Possession: Cognitive Sources, Forces, and Grammaticalization

Cambridge Studies in Linguistics

by Bernd Heine

Bernd Heine argues that the structure of grammatical categories is predictable to a large extent once we know the range of possible cognitive structures from which they are derived. The author uses as his example the structure of predicative possession, and shows how most of the possessive constructions to be found in the world's languages can be traced back to a small set of basic conceptual patterns. Using grammaticalization theory Heine describes how each affects the word order and morphosyntax of the resulting possessive construction.

Genres: Linguistics

292 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1997

Reviews

[Othman]

The book gives a nice cross-linguistic typological survey of possession, but it does not offer in-detail discussions of the analyses reviewed or give a theoretical discussion of possession, which is not surprising, though, since the works cited are overwhelmingly from the typological literature.